Emergents TCG: The Juice Without the Squeeze
A worthy successor to Magic the Gathering with a player-friendly economy
Emergents is a superb game. I haven't had this much fun with a TCG since I played Magic the Gathering as a kid. I recommend you download Emergents and join the discord.
I’ve always loved IRL TCGs, and I’ve found the mobile TCGs such as Hearthstone and Marvel Snap to be incredibly fun, addictive and utterly exploitative. They are a showcase of the best and worst of contemporary games. The gameplay has been perfected. But the economics are diabolical.
I won’t be reviewing the Emergents gameplay in detail here, apart from to say it is brilliant. I can point you to many gushing reviews. My focus will fall on the economy.
The Emergents economy has been designed to be the opposite of all the most hated aspects about mobile TCGs. It succeeds admirably. To my suprise, it turns out this is made possible by blockchain technology. If this makes you immediately skeptical, I don't blame you. Digital TCGs, including the blockchain variety, have been among the worst value and most manipulative products you can sink your precious time and money into for years. Like duct tape, superpowers and iPhones, blockchain can be used for good or evil.
What’s so good about the Emergents economy?
You can play for free
You don’t have to know anything about blockchain
You can trade your cards for other cards
You can sell your cards for money
Your cards will never be nerfed
The meta is self-balancing
The meta rewards creativity
Interpop have built a world that you want to move to. They do not trap you there or punish you for leaving. You can leave the game ecosystem at any time, and even take out much of the money you spent there. You might even make a profit. Games such as Marvel Snap, Hearthstone and Magic Arena will never let you sell your digital cards back to them and leave. They may not even let you sell cards back to them so you can buy other cards!
Wait… I thought blockchain was bad
Blockchain isn't bad. What's bad is misaligned incentives. For mobile TCGs to be profitable, they have to make you feel amazing, have fun, flash lights, get excited, get addicted, think about them all the time and open the app every spare moment and bathroom break. They also have to make you frustrated, give you FOMO and make you anxious so you'll pay to have those bad feelings taken away. They have to squeeze you hard enough that you pay whatever you can afford, but not so hard that you'll pop, or even worse, delete your account.
Many popular digital TCGs are fantastic. They have to be - because that's the only way you'll take all the crap they make you put up with, the daily quests, the constant asks for money. Knowing the games are just so incredibly fun and addictive, I pass no judgement on anyone who spends hundreds or even thousands of dollars on Arena, Hearthstone or Marvel Snap. These are great games with a thriving community of players. But if you are such a player, just know that there now exists a digital TCG economy, Emergents TCG, where your digital cards will hold value that will not be arbitrarily diluted; a TCG where the creator’s interests are aligned with yours.
Wait… so why is blockchain good then?
Blockchain isn't good. Most blockchain/ NFTs TCGs just recapitulate the same dodgy business models and gameplay experience as the web 2 mobile TCGs we've come to know and love and hate. Usually, the 'innovations' blockchain games claim to add are some flavour of the following:
"Trade and Sell your items for real money!"
NFTs do allow this, but anyone who has heard of World of Warcraft (or Ultima Online for that matter) knows you don't need blockchain for this, just for the developers to support it.
"Truly own your in-game items!"
This is true, but it comes at a cost. Many players do not see the value. Sure, on the blockchain the developers can't confiscate your in-game items by locking you out of your account. But in the more likely case that you forgot your password and didn't set up 2FA, they can't help you get your items back, either.1
"Play to earn! Get rich!"
The play-to-earn model is similar to the requirement to do daily quests /plays / wins to earn gold in web 2 games. The difference is that the gold is a crypto token. In some games you can make the USD minimum wage in these games (which may be good pay in the philippines) Sometimes these tokens take off in value due to multi-level-marketing and ponzi type dynamics, and some lucky people DO get rich. But there are far more losers than winners.
Please just tell me: Is blockchain good or bad?
Blockchain is lawful neutral. In the Interpop party, the use of blockchain smart contracts have been recruited as a force for good. I’ll start with an overview of the economy, followed by the benefits as I see them. Then I’ll go into a bit more detail about how it ties in with blockchain tech. Please keep in mind that although I am a fan and have been following the project, I do not have detailed knowledge of Interpop’s plans. Any part of this post could be in error. I will update the post and apppend a correction should I2 learn I have made errors.
An overview of the Emergents economy
You can play for free. Everyone starts with a free set of 110 unique cards.
You buy cards directly from minterpop with XTZ or credit card.
You can sell cards directly back to minterpop in return for XTZ.
XTZ is the cryptocurrency of the tezos blockchain. You can convert it back to your home currency through a crypto broker that operates in your country.
The current prices for the cards are as follows: (prices in xtz)
After a certain point, as people buy more copies of a card, its price goes up. If people sell that card back to minterpop, its price goes down.
Gold (Rare) cards go up (down) in price quickly as they become more (less) popular. Bronze (common) cards go up (down) in price slowly as they become more (less) popular.
You don't have to buy and sell your cards through minterpop, although that is the most convenient way. You can also buy and sell them on NFT marketplaces, and gift them directly to friends.
Soon you will be able to buy and sell the cards from within the game client (at the moment you must use the interpop shop website, minterpop)
Why this is great
1. You can play for free
Everyone starts with a set of 110 free cards. You have 3 copies of each, which is the max allowable in a deck. There are many very powerful cards, combos and decks available in the free set. The free set has its own rich meta, and I suspect that free set tournaments are coming and will be awesome.
2. You don’t have to know anything about blockchain or crypto
You can buy cards with credit card without knowing anything about crypto or blockchain. For the moment, if you want to sell them back or swap them for other cards you will have to use a Kukai tezos wallet, which has a learning curve - but soon buying and selling will all be seamless and within the game.
3. You can trade your cards for cards
Not only can you trade your cards for cards, but you'll get 90% of the value of your card back when you 'dust'3 it into XTZ so you can buy new cards. This is much better than comparable games.
Consider that you bought cards for a few different games, and then you later decided you wanted to trade them for other cards. How much of their value would they retain?
Here are some rough approximations:
4. You can sell your cards for money
Consider you bought cards for a few different games, and later you decided you wanted to turn them back into cash. How much of your money will you get back?
Here are some rough approximations:
The reason Emergents is only at 85% in this table is because there will be some fees from a broker to convert your national currency to XTZ and back again.
The "^" footnote in the above image is important! Although I personally am optimistic about the future value of XTZ, it is important to understand that if the value of XTZ drops by 50%, then the real world value of your cards will drop 50%. As with all things NFT and blockchain - don't spend anything that you can't afford to lose. The opposite is also true - the value *could* double or triple. Still, no matter how low XTZ drops, your Emergents cards will always have more real world resale value that cards bought on Arena or Hearthstone, which is zero! Also remember that if you are just selling your cards to trade for cards, the real world exchange rate has no effect on much value you get from ‘dusting’ your cards into XTZ.
5. Your cards will never be nerfed
Interpop have committed that no card you buy from Interpop will ever be nerfed.4 If this sounds like a recipe for disaster, consider the next point before you pass judgement:
6. The meta is self-balancing
Tournaments will be based around a budget (I’m getting this idea from the whitepaper, apologies if this is outdated) There may, for example, be a free tournament, a $50 tournament and a $150 tournament. If a card is very powerful, many players will buy it, and the price will go up. This will increase the opportunity cost of including that card in a tournament deck, which will restore balance to the meta.5
If that doesn't make sense - consider this extreme example: imagine if you were entering a tournament where each player could draft cards worth max $100. There is a very overpowered card in the meta, but it costs exactly $100 to buy. You will have to choose between building a deck with just one overpowered card with the remainder from the free set, or a more balanced deck from a much wider pool of options from the free and paid set.
We can expect overpowered cards to rise in value until the meta simply balances out again! This is a self-healing meta. Amazing stuff.
7. The meta rewards creativity
Players who are highly creative and skilled at developing novel deck concepts will excel in Emergents. Cards that are under-appreciated will be cheap. If you are a good 'talent scout' for undervalued Emergents characters/ cards and a skilled brewer, you will be able to take advantage of these cheap cards to build a better deck given the tournament budget, and win more. Better yet, if others start to adopt your deck idea because you are winning and/or streaming, the cards in your winning deck will increase in value as more people buy them!
This all sounds amazing
Yes. Unless you really want to get into the weeds of blockchain stuff, you should stop reading this article now and come play the game with us. Go to play.emergentstcg.com and join the discord.
But if you are keen to know more about the economics and technology, I am very happy to oblige! Please, come right this way!
What does blockchain have to do with this again?
Blockchain makes this economic design possible. More specifically, smart contracts make this possible. And even more specifically, bonding curves and uniform price auctions on the Tezos blockchain make this possible.
From now on, I will assume you understand some basics of economics and blockchain.6 That said, if you are new to these topics and want to try to follow anyway, here are some definitions7 to get you up to speed.
Blockchain: think of it as a shared computer that anyone can use and see everything it is doing.
Smart Contract: think of it like a computer program on a blockchain. You can send it data, ask it to do computer stuff. It can also store and transfer crypto-currency. A smart contract can be many things, including a piggy-bank, a game, a collection of NFTs or a shop. The Emergents smart contracts appear to be kind of a mix of the four possibilities just mentioned.
Bonding Curve: A bonding curve is a static curve that defines what the price of an NFT will be for a given supply on the market.
Here's a screenshot from minterpop.com:
In blue and orange are the 'buy' and 'sell' bonding curves for the card Love Note (one of my fave bronze cards). Here’s some nice comic art:
The Love Note smart contract is basically a shop that you can access through the minterpop website (and in the future, from within the game). The price of buying a Love Note is dictated by the bonding curve shown above.
The vertical red line shows the current number of Love Note cards in circulation. As the game was released just a few weeks ago, there are only 57 copies of Love Note in player collections so far. The buy and sell prices are given by the height where the red line intersects with the blue and orange curves.
The graph isn't super clear because the orange and blue lines are so close, but if you zoomed in you would see that for the current quantity of 57, it costs 1 XTZ to buy a copy of Love Note, or you could sell it back to the shop for 0.9XTZ, (90% of the buy price). These prices will be the same until 3000 copies are in circulation - after that point, the prices will rise.
Just to drive the point home:
When you buy a card, interpop takes the 10% difference between the buy and sell price as profit ("the spread"). The other 90% of the value of the cards is locked securely in the smart contract.
No-one, not even the Interpop blockchain developers, can withdraw this crypto-currency without selling copies of Love Note back to the contract.8
This economic design is impossible for a web 2 company to replicate outside the blockchain, for a host of technical, financial, legal and business reasons. Consider the hurdles:
If a game company could let you buy cards from them and say that it intends to allow customers to sell the cards back to them in the future, indefinitely. But even if they made this promise with honest intentions, they could never guarantee that future owners or managers of the company would keep that promise.
Perhaps there is some complicated way of doing this where a game company legally bound itself to sell the cards back according to the rules defined by an algorithm, and became custodian to millions of customer dollars based. But the legal fees and tax complications would be enormously costly.
Simply transferring money between customer and company bank accounts can be costly, fees may take up 1 - 2% of a transaction. An app platform like Apple’s App store infamously takes 30%! On the blockchain, the costs to transfer value on the tezos blockchain are in the order of 0.0005%!
These are just some of the most obvious issues - there are many more. For all practical purposes, this economic design is impossible without blockchain
Would you like to know more?
There is a lot more to be said about the Emergents TCG economy. The most important topic I have missed here is the issue of uniform auctions. Presently, the starting price of each card is the minimum for its rarity, but that will not be the case in the future when uniform auctions are introduced. This is a topic for another article, but I discussed this in a tweet thread if you would like to go deeper.
Many other topics deserve exploration. Two that come to mind:
Chromatic improvements to cards, which I haven’t even touched on, and the related play-to-earn potential. I’m generally opposed to play-to-earn, but this is a version of P2E that does not involve a token with an ever-expanding supply. I think it has some potential and some potential problems.
The relationship between the ‘normal’ cards that are sold via bonding curves and the promo cards that are more like ‘traditional’9 NFTs. I believe the promo cards will act as something of a speculation pressure release valve - giving crypto bros a place to speculate while still within the Emergents system, that will provide the volatility and upside risk they want without allowing interference with the meta.
What else? Comments are welcomed.
The future of TCGs
I have great fun playing the Emergents game itself - I'm obviously a huge fan. It’s a game that you want to play rather than that you feel compelled to play. But I'm an even bigger fan of the economic design and how it aligns the incentives of the players and the creators. It's a game you can spend money on without feeling like a sucker.
The economy matters for the player experience. Playing Hearthstone, Marvel Snap and MtG Arena is sort of like walking onto a holiday cruise ship. It’s fun (?), but you have to pay for everything with the Cruise Ship Dollars on your Cruise Ship Card and it’s all but impossible to leave. Emergents is more like captaining your own yacht. You can go wherever you want, and go home whenever you want. You can even sell your yacht, buy an RV instead, and keep the change.
The old mobile TCG business model sucks you into a swirling vortex of rewards and anxiety. The games are tremendously fun and addictive, but the focus is on the superficial and base pleasures of the games, the new card, the next win, the flashy booster, the invisible pull of my phone. What I loved about Magic the Gathering as a kid was much richer. I would get lost in the creativity of deck building, and show off my creations to my friends. It wasn't just fun, it wasn't just addictive - it was deeply satisfying. Emergents preserves this feeling. Come play it with us!
See you in the discord.
P.S:
I don't work for Interpop in any capacity. I'm a player and a collector. Corrections are welcomed.
This situation will improve as user experience design gets better on the blockchains and/or users become educated about the best ways to use hardware wallets and secure their private keys. I’m not sure what plan, if any, Interpop has to deal with this challenge.
… when I …
In the popular mobile TCG Hearthstone, you can convert cards you own into an in-game currency called “dust” which you can use to buy new cards.
I believe they have shared that in an extreme case, they might ban a card from play, and then buy it back from owners at the market rate, or something similar.
This may have the added bonus of reducing volatility in card prices
If you would value a more accessible explanation, please share this in the comments along with any areas you find especially puzzling
Very, very rough and technically inaccurate definitions that will do for now.
I just feel I have to put a footnote here to say: I haven’t personally looked at the code for these smart contracts and Interpop has released any detailed information about exactly how they work. It is possible that Interpop has built in all sorts of back doors to remove the money. I really doubt this, because someone who is well versed in Michelson (the language these smart contracts are compiled to) could inspect the contracts right now, which are publicly available on chain, and check what permissions have been granted to Interpop accounts, and what actions they can perform on the contract. Also note: Interpop includes the following disclaimer on their website: “Our current buyback rate is 90% of the card’s current market price. Different cards may have different buy and sell prices at any given time.” This might mean that Interpop can change the spread. I hope they have placed limits on this, because increasing the spread to 100% would essentially allow them to lock the contracts (although not access the money held within). The ability to decrease the spread seems sure to be a feature of the contracts, as they may need to do this in future as a response if competitors enter the market using a similar economic model but offering lower spreads.
I can’t believe I just wrote “Traditional NFTs”. A few years ago no-one had even heard of NFTs! Things move fast in this corner of the internet.